OBJECTIVES: A current and widely used clinical practice is to teach sounds in isolation. After the isolated form is mastered, children are instructed to imbed these sounds into conversational speech. This procedure is not satisfactory as a major and longstanding clinical problem has been the teaching of articulation not as isolated forms, but as elements within the flow of speech. A goal of this research project is to provide information that will make it possible to further the development of clinical procedures which can be effectively used to teach children to articulate sounds correctly in conversational speech. METHODS: Conversational speech represents a dimension of the articulation learning process which has not received thorough study. In this proposal it is suggested that the identification and production of sounds in conversational speech be compared with sounds uttered in isolated syllables, as follows: (a) to determine whether unknown units (nonsense syllables) are better identified in citation form than in conversational speech, (b) to examine normalization function of a known sound preceding the syllable in the sentence, (c) to compare children (who misarticulate /s/) to identify the correct articulation of /s/ in citation syllables and in conversation, and (d) to determine whether special kinds of errors common in children's speech result from attempts to produce utterance in conversational speech in contrast to isolated forms. Perception, production, and acoustic correlates will be examined for these several conditions.